Why did God command violence and genocide in the Old Testament?

Question

Sun Myung Moon · Accepted Answer

Few parts of Scripture trouble sincere readers more than the passages in which God commands Israel to destroy entire nations. A God revealed as love appears, in these chapters, to sanction the very violence He forbids elsewhere. Yet these commands were never expressions of arbitrary wrath. They belong to a particular moment in a long providence whose single aim was to secure a pure foundation on earth through which the Messiah could come, and they must be read in the light of that purpose rather than lifted out of it. The Biblical Foundation The Old Testament records commands of total destruction directed chiefly against the Canaanites. Moses instructed Israel, "But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: but thou shalt utterly destroy them" (Deuteronomy 20:16-17). A similar word came concerning the Amalekites, who had attacked Israel unprovoked in the wilderness (Exodus 17:8-16, 1 Samuel 15:3). Such passages sit uneasily beside the declaration that "God is love" (1 John 4:8) and the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill" (Exodus 20:13). The moral condition of Canaan supplies essential context. Its religion embraced idol worship, divination, sorcery, and the burning of children in sacrifice to idolatry (Deuteronomy 18:9-12, Leviticus 18:21), together with widespread sexual corruption. Of that land God said, "And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants" (Leviticus 18:25). This was not a culture that merely differed from Israel's; it was a society whose practices attacked the very order of creation, and whose influence, once absorbed, would have destroyed the people God had prepared over centuries. The Principle's Clarification The Principle illuminates these passages through indemnity and the providence of restoration. The Fall placed the world under satanic dominion, and God's work ever since has been the step-by-step recovery of persons, families, and territory from that dominion. Recovery is never automatic; it requires conditions by which what was surrendered to evil is restored to God. Canaan was not simply desirable land. It was the territory promised to Abraham (Genesis 15:18-21) as the seedbed of God's kingdom on earth, and it had become one of the most deeply entangled strongholds of evil in the ancient world. The command to separate from it entirely was therefore a condition of separation from Satan, drawn on the same principle by which Noah's family was set apart from a corrupt generation and Abraham was called out of Ur. Israel was to be holy ground, a nation whose lineage, worship, and daily life remained untainted, so that in the fullness of time the Messiah might be born into it. Understood this way, the severity of these commands measures the severity of the corruption they addressed, not a change in God's nature. God's heart in such moments is grief, not pleasure: "As I live, saith the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked" (Ezekiel 33:11). The measures were specific to a time, a place, and a providential purpose, and Scripture nowhere generalizes them into a licence for violence. Where Israel later failed to remain separate, absorbing Canaanite worship and intermarrying with its people, the providence was delayed and the nation itself suffered exile — evidence that the concern throughout was spiritual contamination, not conquest. There is also a warning here about half-hearted obedience. Saul spared what God had told him to devote, and the prophet answered, "Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice" (1 Samuel 15:22). In the providence of restoration, a condition partly fulfilled is a condition lost, and the ground reclaimed from evil slips back into the hands from which it was taken. Living the Principle These commands were given to a particular nation in a particular hour, and no believer is called to repeat them. What abides is the underlying principle: evil must be genuinely separated from, not negotiated with. The battlefield has moved inward, and the same decisiveness is now asked of the heart. That begins with conquering the Canaanites within — the habits, appetites, and attachments that quietly claim territory in us. It continues in the way we confront corrupt structures in society, opposing injustice and exploitation by principled and peaceful means rather than by the violence the ancient text describes. And it asks for watchfulness over what we admit into our homes and minds, since a lineage and a family are protected in the same way a nation once was: by refusing what corrupts before it takes root. Read in the light of God's purpose, these hard chapters cease to be evidence of divine cruelty. They are the record of a God who suffered through the ugliness of a fallen world and accepted painful, interim measures to keep alive the single thread of lineage through which love and life could one day

Why did God command violence and genocide in the Old Testament?

The Biblical Foundation

The Principle's Clarification

Living the Principle

Sources and further reading